


The Scent of Burning Things

by Shampain



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-16
Updated: 2013-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-12 01:44:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shampain/pseuds/Shampain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki makes a discovery during his travels through space. Pre-Avengers, Pre-Trek. BIG OLE SPOILERS for Star Trek: Into Darkness, so don't read unless you've seen the movie or just don't care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Scent of Burning Things

**Author's Note:**

> So right after seeing _Into Darkness_ I came home and wrote fic. Yeah. Basically. :) But now that I've had coffee and can run it through a decent edit, it's postin' time. I may continue writing this idea after I've seen the movie a few more times and gotten a hold of the novelization, if the idea is tempting enough for me.

Space was cold and frozen. It wasn’t Jotunheim though; there was nothing to suggest this was once a vibrant and living world. Instead it was an expanse of nothing, dead and brittle, inorganic. But Loki appreciated it, now that in his travels he no longer bypassed it.

Here stars flickered out in ghastly flashes of death, and matter floated idly by until it was caught into orbit, pulled in by gravity. In so much expanse of nothing – an expanse that was up and down, backwards and forwards, directions that no longer existed without a gravitational centre – Loki found a ship.

His step echoed hollowly down the halls and his hands lingered on the metal. He knew it was cold but as always Loki could not differentiate; no matter how much his blood warmed, in the end he was as icy as they came.

He passed through room after room. He found no source of life, though the suggestion of it was there. There was food in what passed for a larder, sealed up, meant to pass the ages – well, not real food, but nutrients, sustenance for a crew that was absent. Or were they?

Everything was prepped, as if everyone was just shy of arriving. But this ship floated alone in the depths of the unknown, and Loki had found it by chance. He could check the ship’s automated log, if he wanted to. See if it was bound for anywhere, if ever, if there were coordinates keyed in to be activated at the single tap of a button. But instead Loki’s curiosity took him in a different direction, towards a pulse of power he could sense even in the soulless flesh of the ship.

His magic was science, and while each world seemed to operate on different rules, used different ways to get things done, some of it always stayed the same. The security keypad outside the door was something he could feel his way through, unlocking each small mechanism in the door. It was basic. Even when the alarm went off and the ship began to vibrate with a siren and the hallways flashed red, Loki calmly sought just a bit further, and with a touch everything was calm again.

As he suspected, here was the crew. Rows and rows of people, frozen in tubes of glass. Still alive; their vital signs were slow and steady. Interested, Loki stepped into the chamber and quested between the rows of men and women, staring in at them. Already a part of him wanted to sabotage everything so that when this crew did wake up they would have some issues to contend with. He was not above acting like a lordly boy among ants, sometimes.

Instead he stopped in front of one and leaned in close enough that his breath might have steamed against the glass, had his body not regulated itself to the cold already. There was a pale face buried within, bland and yet arresting, the long face carved into something at once unremarkable and irresistibly extraterrestrial. Loki touched the glass.

For a minute he exhaled life into the body within the tube – or at least, within its mind. It flashed to life in a crackle like electricity, and in surprise Loki jumped back with a laugh at that briefest touch. The man, his eyes still closed, continued to sleep, but for a moment Loki had prodded him awake, and the savagery that had rolled out of that psyche had left an exhilarating ghost inside of Loki’s own head, like a scent of burning things.

He looked around him. Were they all the same? Even if they weren’t, this one was worth preserving. Maybe one day he would be important. Maybe one day, so long as nothing untimely occurred to Loki, they would meet again.

He left the chamber, not bothering to re-arm the lock. In a room he did not know the name of he wound his way into the circuits and moved around the data. A slow and steady shift, careful of the rest of that vast ocean of space; in years and years and years, perhaps, this ship would drift into a more populated orbit.

It was time he should wander back to a solar system he knew better. He let his hands drag over the walls again as he walked through the abandoned corridors, listened to the creaks of the ship and the clip of his boots. This was a fine spot for disaster to begin, he decided. The thought had its own brand of delight.

Out in space the stars burned; but a star was a sun so long as it had a planet to cast its light on. Loki looked down at his planet, cold and hostile steel, filled with cold and hostile bodies, drifting on into a destiny as bitter and violent as his own. He felt a flush of warmth, and for a moment Loki imagined that he had just blown to flame a spark of life. And how he loved to watch things burn.


End file.
